Stop the Middlebrooks Madness

If Will Middlebrooks continues to play a pivotal role in the offense, what will the Red Sox do once Kevin Youkilis ready to return? Youkilis is eligible to return on Monday, although it is unlikely he will be activated that day.

Middlebrooks was a third baseman in high school and has played only third base professionally. Could he play the outfield?

“I don’t know,” Bobby Valentine said. “It’s been tossed around in some quarters.”

[…]

“It hasn’t been a table discussion yet. So I don’t think it even has to enter his domain. That being said, I think he’s a pretty — small sample, my being around him — he’s a pretty mature baseball guy. He’s not going to be flustered by a lot of things.”

First, it’s been four games. Four. It seems unlikely that a 1.361 OPS represents his expected level of performance from here on out, so why on earth would we be making decisions off of it? And if you want to argue that he was tearing it up in the minors before being called up, remember that that was 24 games. It’s early, and he’s been hot: that’s to his credit. But Middlebrooks’ career minor league OPS is .787. Youkilis’s career major league OPS is .878.

In Youkilis is healthy, he’ll probably put up better numbers than Middlebrooks over the balance of the season, the kid’s hot start notwithstanding. If he’s not healthy, play Middlebrooks.

But let’s not go crazy with outfield schemes, or worse, trade Youkilis for pennies on the dollar as Edes would apparently have us do.

Second, it strikes me that if Bobby V didn’t want talk of playing the outfield to “enter [Middlebrooks] domain,” it might be better to not talk to the media about the possibility. You know, because the media might ask him about it, and therefore put it into his domain.